Archive for December, 2007

The ruling last week against Friends of Bay Meadows by a state appeals court panel centered around 36 signatures that were collected in 2005 for a petition to save the Bay Meadows race track from demolition.

The group tried to argue that the signatures in question, which were collected from people who needed assistance in filling out the form, because of infirmity or for some other reason, should have been counted.

The 2005 petition campaign fell just short of the number of signatures needed to challenge a City Council decision approving the redevelopment of the track.

But the panel upheld the 2006 ruling of San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Mark Forcum, who found that the signatures were not accompanied by a second signature in the margin by a witness to the act, as required by law.

San Mateo County Supervisor Rich Gordon got called up to Sacramento earlier this week in his capacity as president of the California State Association of Counties, a group that represents the interests of all 58 counties statewide.

Gordon, who was elected president of the organization in November, met with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger along with other officials for a sober discussion of a projected state budget shortfall for the coming year of roughly $10 billion or more.

Schwarzenegger is considering across the board 10-percent reductions for all state departments for the coming fiscal year. Gordon said it’s not yet clear what this will mean for the county budget, which is already in trouble.

Did you know that, from 2004-2006, 11th graders in San Mateo County “were more likely than their counterparts in California to report use of alcohol, marijuana and cigarettes” within the last 30 days?

During that period, statistics show that by the 11th grade “41 percent of students reported having consumed alcohol in the previous month, 21 percent reported having smoked marijuana and 18 percent reported having smoked cigarettes.”

It all looks so peaceful from above, doesn’t it? That’s the view (courtesy of one Jeremy Zarodny) approaching Half Moon Bay Airport, which is lucky not to depend on the city for funding.

Half Moon Bay is in a world of financial hurt following the ruling of a federal judge last week in a dispute with Chop Keenan, the owner of a 25-acre property just east of Highway 1 and north of state Highway 92.

(To view the location, go to Google and enter “Terrace Avenue Half Moon Bay.” Results of this search are here. Then click “Satellite” and you’ll see that Beachwood is the empty green parcel between two housing clusters along Grandview Boulevard and Terrace Avenue.)

For those not inclined to slog through the 167-page decision, the Insider takes a closer look.

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker gave the city of Half Moon Bay a thorough and embarassing spanking in his $37-million ruling in favor of the owners of Beachwood, a decision that threatens to hamstring the city finacially for years and perhaps decades to come, since its annual budget is only about $10 million.